Quick hits from the KYMERA PRESS offerings of Mary Shelley Presents

10/07/2019
By Alex Ness

As I've even recently stated, Mary Shelley is one of my favorite authors, especially for horror.  She is used as a sort of host of a story telling event, and is welcome here.  But I am glad in any event to have been able to read this three volumes of MARY SHELLEY PRESENTS.
 
KYMERAPRESS.COM

“That night I dreamed of The Creature, pieced together from corpses, revived … and unloved. His tragedy has granted me immortality. Other women writers of my time have not been as lucky. Famous once, their ghostly stories now gather dust.”- Mary Shelley

Imagine if you will that one of the most renown female horror fiction writers of our time rose from the grave to lift up her contemporary female voices that would have otherwise been forgotten. It’s happening for real and the stories are here to haunt your dreams courtesy of Kymera Press as Mary Shelley Presents.  All the stories are adapted by award winning, NY Times Bestselling Author Nancy Holder (Buffy the Vampire Slayer).  The original text of each short story is included in the back of each book, after the comic adaptation.

Issue 1 features Elizabeth Gaskell’s, The Old Nurse’s Story.  This story came to be after Charles Dickens’ asked Ms. Gaskell to write a story  for the 1852 Christmas special issue of Household Words magazine. It is a terrifying tale of evil and remorse.
 
This was an amazing story, filled with nuance and a feel like it was woven from the era it depicts.  The art is perfectly done, the colors made this look amazing.  The writing carried with it tones and notes of a hand that knows how to tell a story.  The organ playing, the ghosts haunting, the visceral feeling of fear and pain made this a particularly good read.

Issue 2  Edith Nesbit’s, Man-Size in Marble.  A young pair of newlyweds settling down into a small cottage in a quiet village are looking forward to a pleasant, pastoral life. The husband dismisses a superstitious maid’s tale. First published in the December 1887 issue of the Home Chimes magazine. The story was later collected in Nesbit’s 1893 anthology Grim Tales. 

This work was fooking creepy.  We, as well as the husband are made to dismiss the maid who tells the tall creepy tale, only to our own peril.   This is one scary ass book.  It revels in a certain lush detail, scaring for the shadows as well as the easily seen... The writing was perfectly done, letting the reader see it and hear it as much as telling it via straight forward action.  The art, as with issue 1, is superbly done.

Issue 3 Adaptating of Margaret Strickland’s The Case of Sir Alistir Moeran. Captain Maurice Kilvert returns from India to find his beloved Ethene is engaged to Sir Alister Moeran. First published in the July 1913 issue of the The Novel Magazine magazine. The story was later collected in the anthology Uncanny Tales first published in 1916.

In the day of the writing of the original work, it was commonplace to write about Africa or India, in the colonial empire of the United Kingdom as being a source of darkness, and mystery.  This tale tells that sort of tale with a great bit more quality than you might normally find, and it exceeded the source material it came from.  Having said that, the story is one where the reader feels a question burning, and a desire to escape it rather than figure it out.  We get to do both.  Fantastic art again, the writing was far better than most works adapting prose or poetry to comic book form.